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When I make jewelry, I tend to futz a lot with it. (Futz is sort of a technical term…it means “play with”)
And, as sometimes happens, I go overboard and ruin the piece.
Case in point: I had a very nice piece of sterling silver sheet that I cut down to about 1 1/2″ x 1″. I textured it. I patterned it. I stamped it. I filed it. I punched holes in it.
Then I soldered on an oval bezel I had made for a really nice, flashy blue moonstone. All was looking pretty good…but I knew that more had to be done with it.
I ended up soldering a sterling silver spiral onto the top – overlapping the top by maybe 1/4″. Now we were getting somewhere. The spiral would serve as the bail for the chain. Looking good!

Until I realized that no matter how I tried, with many different methods, I couldn’t get it polished right. Just didn’t look the way I wanted it to.

Flash forward to me scrubbing, rubbing, polishing, dremel-ing and more to get some gunk off. Long story short – spiral falls off. Okay. back to the pickle, clean it up, and try to solder the spiral on again. Nope. Not happening. Fire got so hot it started to melt the spiral.

Bring it back into the studio to rethink. By this time, I had also realized that what my pendant needed was something in the middle between the spiral and the moonstone. I decided a rivet with a decorative washer would do the trick. And it did. For a while. Until I realized again how grimy it looked.

Decided to toss it in the pickle again and try to re-solder the spiral. Did it at the end of the day.

Big mistake.

Forgot about it. When I remembered this morning, the moonstone was toast. (Reminder to me: pickle=acid=not good on soft gemstones).

So now, it’s back to square one. Going to remove the moonstone and the bezel (if possible) and start over.

What I learned:

* stop and think before doing

* if you don’t have the right tools, findings, materials – order it and wait for it